Stripes
by MARVELous life
Summary: He found her in the wardrobe. A period dress was placed neatly on the floor, and Rose was playing dress up with a cricket jacket and a long striped scarf. Ten/Rose, plot-less fluff, with a small hint of romance. Set any time between New Earth and Fear Her.


**Look, I have another fic! That's, what four days and four fics now? Cool! This one is longer and happier than yesterday, so woo-hoo! You can blame the fourth Doctor and his jelly babies for this fic. His scarf was the inspiration.**

**Disclaimer: Nope, DW is not mine. And it's not for lack of trying!**

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"Rose! Are you ready yet?" The Doctor called into the TARDIS's wardrobe. She had run off into the giant room about an hour ago, intent on finding a period dress for the time that they had landed in—London, 1838—and he hadn't seen her since. The Doctor understood that human females tended to take a while to get ready, but he thought that an hour had to be pushing it.

"Rose!" He called again. Was she lost? The thought was absurd—no one had ever gotten lost in the wardrobe before. Well, Rose always was wandering off.

He was about to call out again, when he heard a feminine giggle, meaning Rose was nearby. Unless the TARDIS had taken to giggling aloud. Stranger things had happened. "Come on, Rose, Victorian London is out there, not in the wardrobe." He turned the corner to find a period dress placed neatly on the floor, out of place among the jumpers hanging on racks around it. Rose stood by a rack of seemingly random clothing items, playing dress up with a cricket jacket and a striped scarf.

"Doctor, you have the weirdest stuff in here," Rose told him. She looped an end of the scarf around her neck, trying to keep it off the ground, but it was still too long.

The Doctor raised an eyebrow. "I thought you were looking at period clothes," he accused.

"I was!" She motioned to the blue dress on the ground. "I found that for myself, and then I thought that you should change out of that suit for once, so I started looking for something for you to wear, and the TARDIS just sort of led me here." She glanced back at the rack she had plucked the jacket and scarf from. "Would you really wear all of this?"

"I used to," the Doctor told her.

"Really? Even . . . this?" She whirled around and grabbed a jumper from its hanger, then turned back around and held it out in front of her. She immediately burst into laughter.

"Oi! Different man, different style. I thought we covered this!" The Doctor reprimanded. Different man or not, he felt the need to defend the fashion choices of his past regenerations.

"Yeah, but this? Really?" Rose continued to giggle at the clothing article held in her hands. "Didn't you ever think that the question marks _all over_ were a bit much, even for you?" She made to put the jumper back on the rack before he could answer, but her eyes caught something else.

"There's a matching umbrella?!"

"I thought it looked good back then!" Rose broke into laughter yet again, while the Doctor merely grumbled good-naturedly. He put the umbrella and jumper back where they belonged.

"Did you used to wear this scarf, too?" Rose draped the scarf across her shoulders a few more times, but it still didn't rise above her calves. Really, the Doctor was just glad that she wasn't asking about the cricket jacket—he didn't want to explain that a stick of celery had been worn with it.

"As a matter of fact, I did! See?" He snatched the dangling ends of the scarf and proceeded to loop them around his own neck much the way he had used to, pulling him and Rose close together in the process. Their faces were just a few inches away now, with the unnecessarily long scarf connecting them.

"And how long ago was this?" The teasing was still in Rose's tone, but her volume had dropped to a lower decibel, and the Doctor could feel wisps of her breath across his face.

"This old thing? Oh, my fourth regeneration," the Doctor replied in the much the same tone as Rose, and now it was her turn to feel his breath ghosting over her face.

"What regeneration are you on now?"

"This is my tenth."

"So, that means that, technically, you've died—"

"Nine times, yeah," the Doctor finished for her, and her eyes with bits of wonder and sadness at the thought of him 'dying' as many times as he had. The teasing mood had lessened considerably, but neither of them had moved so much as a centimeter away. If anything, they seemed to be getting closer—just by millimeters, but closer still. The Doctor noticed that, sometime during the exchange, he had taken hold of Rose's hand. To his surprise, he wasn't minding the intimate proximity. Instead, he found that he rather liked it—and that scared him.

He released his grip on her hand, using both of his to lift the scarf from around her neck and place it around his own. He pulled on the ends of the striped scarf to tighten the loop, and the scarf became too long again, with the ends dragging around his feet.

"Right, yes, 1838 awaits! Get changed, and then we can go and explore!" He pulled his face away from hers and motioned to the dress on the ground. "And no, I will not be changing, Rose Tyler. This suit works just fine, no matter where or when I am." He hastened towards the wardrobe's exit, going to wait for his companion in the console room, leaving a slightly flustered Rose behind him, still in his old cricket jacket.

Rose only laughed some more as he tripped over the scarf on his way out.

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**What do you think? Review or favorite and let me know, please! Now I really want to see David Tennant in the fourth Doctor's scarf... And I want some jelly babies!**


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